The institutionalization of monogamous bourgeois marriage created the demand for prostitution

Evidence

In all these countries, one of the consequences of the “honest wife’s” servitude to the family is prostitution. Hypocritically kept on society’s fringes, prostitutes fill a highly important role. Christianity pours scorn on them but accepts them as a necessary evil. “Getting rid of the prostitutes,” said Saint Augustine, “will trouble society by dissoluteness.” Later, Saint Thomas—or at least the theologian that signed his name to Book IV of De regimine principium—asserted: “Remove public women from society and debauchery will disrupt it by disorder of all kinds. Prostitutes are to a city what a cesspool is to a palace: get rid of the cesspool and the palace will become an unsavory and loathsome place.” In the early Middle Ages, moral license was such that women of pleasure were hardly necessary; but when the bourgeois family became institutionalized and monogamy rigorous, man obviously had to go outside the home for his pleasure. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 214

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the second published article on moral panics over immodesty/dress as class signaling — the same logic of controlling female bodies through stratified moral codes, including prostitutes marked by distinctive apparel. — connects to: Monogamous marriage structurally produces the cuckold and the lover as social types — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1620; Economic change converts marriage from servitude into reciprocal free contract — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1093; The codified drinky system structures sex-for-pay transactions near bases. (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Worth verifying whether the De regimine principium Book IV attribution to Aquinas is genuine or a pseudepigraphal insertion, as Beauvoir herself hedges.

Broader Connections

• Monogamous marriage structurally produces the cuckold and the lover as social types #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1620
• Marriage’s frustrated eroticism causally drives wives into adultery #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1617
• Economic change converts marriage from servitude into reciprocal free contract #complicates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1093
• Erotic desire fundamentally resists social regulation and institutions #complicates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 406
• Marriage and prostitution differ only in price and contract length #qualifies (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1646
• The codified drinky system structures sex-for-pay transactions near bases. #exemplifies (0.75)